Career Coach Reveals What Recruiters Really Want To Hear When They Ask You What Your Weaknesses Are
It's the most dreaded part of a job interview — because it's actually a trick question.
sturti | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Job interviews are stressful affairs, any way you slice them. But perhaps no question causes quite so many jitters as, "What's your greatest weakness?"
Instantly, it feels like a trap — if you're honest, it's probably that you're late, or get nothing done after 3:00, or hate your career field with the fire of a thousand suns and spend most of the work day dreaming of being an artisanal jam maker in Provence with a Lhasa Apso named Bernice. That's the kind of candor that gets you the boot!
So what on Earth are you actually supposed to say? Well, a career coach on TikTok said it's really pretty simple — once we know what interviewers are actually asking when they make the query.
The career coach explained what recruiters really want to hear when they ask about your weaknesses.
Sonia, known on TikTok as @levelupwithsonia, is a veteran recruiter and a career coach who helps job seekers strategize their job interviews, among other services. She said the stock answer we all tend to give to the question about our weaknesses has GOT to go.
"If one more client gets on an interview prep call with me and they tell me their weakness is being a perfectionist, I'm going to end the call," Sonia joked. Okay, guilty — we've all used that one.
For some of us, it really IS a problem that makes all of our work take twice as long as it needs to, and we end up having conversations with our boss that are basically like, "Please do a worse job, faster." Do not ask me how I know this!
The career coach explained that 'what are your weaknesses' is actually a trick question because it's about the past, not the present.
Even if perfectionism really IS your greatest weakness, it's still a bad answer. Why? Sonia explained that it's basically what everyone says.
As she put it, "I can guarantee you that almost every single hiring manager in HR has already heard this." So, how do you figure out what to say instead? Sonia said that the key is to realize that it's actually "a trick question."
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While it's usually framed in the present tense, what recruiters actually want to know is "a weakness that you've had in the past in your career, and how you're dealing with it and how you're working on it."
The career coach offered four examples of good answers to the interview weakness question:
Sonia offered four examples that are better answers than "perfectionism."
These examples may not apply to you specifically, but they show the format that business leaders are looking for — essentially naming a roadblock and how it has helped you grow and broaden your skills.
1. You struggle with ambiguity
Sonia explained that she has worked quite a bit in academia, which was a bit like having to learn another language. "Anybody that knows about academics," she explained, "knows that these are not business people. They're visionaries."
As a businesswoman, this was often confusing for her because she's "tactical" as opposed to creative and abstract like her academic colleagues. The ambiguity inherent to that threw her for a loop.
So, to combat it, she had to learn to ask lots of very strategic questions to cut through the ambiguity inherent to their different approaches. To an interviewer, this showed that she wasn't just versatile, but very resourceful and able to find her way through difficult and confusing situations.
2. You show too much compassion
Sonia said this is a great answer for anyone who works in fields where they deal closely with "other people's Issues." But even for those of us in regular old office jobs, it's easy to put other's needs and feelings first, to be people-pleasing, conflict-avoidant, etc.
Sonia says this is an opportunity to talk about how you learned to set boundaries, what mechanisms for self-care and support you set up for yourself, and even how you leveraged some of your employee benefits to help you manage the way others' needs interact with your job.
3. You have trouble letting go of projects
This, Sonia said, can be very useful for people who work in management or project management. The weakness you name can be that you have a hard time letting go of the reins and tend to spend too much time honing each stage of a project.
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To deal with and grow from this shortcoming, Sonia suggested talking about building deadlines into project stages that are non-negotiable so that you keep the ball rolling.
4. You focus too much on the details
"Detail-oriented" is usually seen as desirable, but being TOO focused on details can bog you down and hinder progress. Sonia said this tendency is a great opportunity to set yourself up to talk about your leadership and management skills.
"When you're looking to be a leader… you need to be able to think of things in the big picture," she said. So, you can discuss how you've worked to focus on things like KPIs, project deadlines, and delegating tasks "rather than constantly focusing on the nitty gritty."
It might take a bit of thought to come up with the right weaknesses for whatever your job or field is, but Sonia's method definitely gives you more to talk about — and more opportunities to burnish your reputation — than the usual boilerplate "perfectionism" routine.
And anything that helps you stick out in today's cutthroat job market is always a good thing.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.